> That response reeks of astonishing arrogance. It doesn’t surprise me that nearly 50% of Americans voted for Donald Trump he perfectly embodies that mindset. Do you genuinely believe you are superior to the rest of the world? What you call “innovation” or a “better product” is often nothing more than the creation of dominant market positions through massive, capital deployment, followed by straightforward rent extraction. The European Union has every right to regulate markets operating within its jurisdiction, especially when there are credible concerns about anti-competitive practices and abuse of dominance. From what I’ve seen, there may be sufficient grounds to consider collective legal action against LinkedIn at the European level. As for so-called “European nationalist ambitions,” rest assured: Europe does not lack capable lawyers or regulatory expertise. I will be forwarding the relevant material to contacts of mine working within the European institutions in Brussels.
This all seems to miss the point, which is: why does the US create so much stuff that Europe doesn't? Turning that useful reflective question into an attack on Americans sounds perfect if you want to refuse to work it out and change accordingly.
> This all seems to miss the point, which is: why does the US create so much stuff that Europe doesn't? Turning that useful reflective question into an attack on Americans sounds perfect if you want to refuse to work it out and change accordingly.
Because the US had so much venture capital, during the time of the low interest rates it was basically free money so they could afford to throw it to the wall and see what sticks. 90% of them would sink but it didn't matter. That doesn't fly here.
Then, they used that money to subsidise adoption, and then once the users were hooked into rent extraction as the OP mentioned. We call this process enshittification these days, and it's a really predatory business practice.
European companies don't do that as much because we have more guardrails against it, and more importantly we didn't have random cash sloshing up the walls. American could do that especially because of the petrodollar. Once the dollar loses its international status it will be a lot harder to do (and it already is due to the rising interest rates).
It was no surprise that exactly with the rising interest rates all the companies started tightening up their subscriptions. Netflix, amazon, all exploding in cost and introducing ads. Same with meta's platforms.
>why does the US create so much stuff that Europe doesn't?
because the "stuff" in question is social networks who live, as the name suggests, off network effects. To have a European LinkedIn would require everyone in Europe to switch at the same time. Which can be trivially arranged, we just would need the courage to ban LinkedIn and every other American social media company. We'd have a clone up and running in a month. You only need to look to China who did exactly this.
> "We just would need the courage to ban LinkedIn and every other American social media company. We'd have a clone up and running in a month. You only need to look to China who did exactly this."
That's socialist dictatorship. Why do you want the EU to be more like China, instead of the EU being more like the US? It will result in further isolation and decline of Europe which sorely depends both on the US (and China) for survival.
I don't want to, but if people like you represent how Americans think, with nothing but contempt for Europe and only obsessed with power, then the Chinese were right about who Americans are and we were naive.
Then achieving autonomy quickly is necessary. And it's not about isolationism, just different priorities. The Chinese aren't isolated either. It's the US that's isolating itself right now as other countries see how they're treated.
Companies need someone to blame who has skin in the game.
An "open source contributor" is not gonna wake up at 2AM on a Saturday because the business that someone else partially built on their free code suddenly went down.
This is ALSO, conveniently, why AI's will never completely replace human developers. You cannot blame, reward, or punish an entity that has no such sensitivities.
Well - no. There are some products where the product itself was relatively simple to build, and the rest was product-market fit. Those are the easy ones technically, but that's not the only type of successful product. YouTube wouldn't be working today if it broke all the time under load.
If that were true, we wouldn't have companies overproducing and burning unsold products to protect profits on the next model.
Business and economics don't work the way you naively assume. Businesses should have a natural incentive to provide an environment that doesn't kill workers because it's cheaper to not kill someone and not hire a replacement. This is entirely disjoint from the reality where we have laws saying things like "you must stop a machine before putting a person inside it".
Business and economies are not rational by any definition of the word. If something feels like it will be easier or more profitable, business will happily shovel children into the active machinery of a printing press until government forces them to stop.
We have something like 200 years of labor laws around this point. You should probably read some history and ask yourself why every government on the planet has been compelled to force legislation on business to protect the interests of the people.
> Business and economies are not rational by any definition of the word. If something feels like it will be easier or more profitable, business will happily shovel children into the active machinery of a printing press until government forces them to stop.
This is an odd thing to say. Governments will happily shovel the taxes of people's entire working lives into pointless spending. They'll also happily shovel young men to their actual deaths in wars. Now you know this, will you be hyper-cynical about governments, or are you just blaring your bias?
The world makes clothes incredibly cheaply. Any country can solve this problem if it wants to. It doesn't need silly fashion clothes shipped from America to do so.
Absolutely poverty is just a distribution problem. But ultimately somebody has to step up to do the distribution to solve it. It doesn’t really matter who. But given that the problem still exists, there’s not enough people stepping up in the right places.
The answer is simple: despite so much money given and forgiven, and people going over all the time to build toilets and basic human-scale improvements, most countries with real deprivation have a massive corruption problem, mainly culturally induced, that stops real improvement. Saying "it's not people stepping up" elides the cultural issue.
There is poverty in 100% of countries. I live in one of the richest places in the world and I can go outside and find people struggling to meet their basic clothing needs.
It's just boring for consumers. Business provides value to customers. Customers dictate what gets produced. And there are customers (e.g. me) who do keep things for a longer amount of time - there's a reason why generally men's clothing makes up around 20% of the total clothing shopping floor space in any given city.
Sure? It seems to me that the companies dictate what I consume. Many many times I wanted to buy exactly the same clothes item or shoes to replace an old one (because I know exactly how it'd fit and wear) only to discover it has been discontinued with no obvious "heir". Sometimes only 6 months later...
Whats the percentage of people chasing "fashion", especially after mid 30s?
It's very very easy to spend much less on clothes. Buying a new handbag every 6 months vs maintaining a bag for 20 years isn't that much different in terms of effort, but one is unbelievably more expensive.
You seem to be implying that to fail to enforce the right to sustenance nets negative freedom. It's not clear whether you've weighed the loss in freedom required to enforce this right. Can I presume you believe this right is worth forcing people to give, forcing by threat of armed expropriation or incarceration?
This all seems to miss the point, which is: why does the US create so much stuff that Europe doesn't? Turning that useful reflective question into an attack on Americans sounds perfect if you want to refuse to work it out and change accordingly.
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